October
19, 2012 "Antiwar
" - The
terrifying prospect of a Mitt Romney foreign policy has somehow
obscured just how badly President Barack Obama has performed.
When Obama took over as the self-proclaimed “leader of the free
world” in January 2009 there was a war going on in Afghanistan,
a lesser war continuing in Iraq, and smaller interventions in
Yemen and Somalia. The global war on terror meant that there
were also ongoing operations and military assistance programs in
places like Colombia and the Philippines. Most of America’s
allies were under friendly though frequently despotic control,
with the key exception of Pakistan, which was becoming
dangerously unstable due to the George W. Bush administration’s
assertion of its own version of democracy promotion. Iran was
the enemy du jour then as now with an alleged nuclear
weapons program that somehow never actually produces a weapon.
Obama, in his run for the presidency, had even criticized
outgoing Bush for being soft on Iran. Relations with Russia and
China were, if not friendly, at least non-confrontational.

So Obama
did not have anything like a tabula rasa to build on, but
he did have the option of going in a number of different
directions. His early decision to begin calling the global war
on terror by another name, overseas contingency operations,
appeared to suggest that he understood that what had started out
as a global crusade on phony principles was essentially both
untenable and overblown for political reasons. A little toning
down of the overly muscular description of what Washington had
been doing was long overdue. Obama’s Cairo speech, which also
came early in his administration, suggested that there might
also be a recalibration of relationships with the Muslim world.
President Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, hardly
merited based on actual performance, was perhaps a suggestion
that the world community hoped for a new United States minus its
delusions of world dominance.

But then
Obama discovered the hubristhat comes as part and parcel
of the presidency. Someone must have whispered in his ear and
told him that America really could set standards for the
remainder of the globe, or so it seemed. So let’s see how he did
on his foreign policy report card. The easiest grade is for
Iraq. Obama wanted to retain a force of thousands of U.S.
soldiers in the country after December 2009, but Baghdad refused
to agree to a status of forces agreement that would have given
the troops immunity from Iraqi law, allowing them to stay on.
The Republicans have accused the White House of mismanaging the
negotiations leading up to the departure, but it is now clear
that the Iraqis wanted the U.S. to go and there was, in truth,
no good reason to stay. The Iraqi government is increasingly
autocratic, terrorism is surging, and Baghdad is now friendlier
with Tehran than it is with Washington, all of which would have
happened anyway. So Obama gets a “B” because he did, in fact,
remove nearly all American soldiers from Iraq even though he
wanted to do otherwise. The fact that Iraq was the greatest
foreign policy disaster ever, trillions of dollars were wasted,
and 5,000 U.S. soldiers died in a war fought on a lie that also
killed hundreds of thousand Iraqis is the fault of the Bush
administration, not of Obama.

But then
there is Afghanistan. Obama did a Bush by
surging a force of 33,000 soldiers to defeat the Taliban in
2010. He had some short-term successes but failed to eliminate
the enemy and is now trying to stitch together a political
agreement that will save face and enable him to meet the end of
2014 self-imposed deadline for the removal of most American
soldiers. Taliban leaders know he has to leave and are waiting
him out. They are confident that they will again rule over
Afghanistan in about three years’ time. The Afghan adventure
will cost the U.S. another cool trillion dollars plus and Obama
has pledged to continue a high level of assistance even after
the troops leave. Two thousand dead Americans and tens of
thousands of dead Afghans later Afghanistan will return to the
state it was in before 2001. There is a net gain in that the
Taliban will not be so foolish as to allow a group like al-Qaeda
to set up shop again inside its borders and invite massive U.S.
retaliation, but that objective could have been attained in
2002. Obama gets an “F” for continuing the war and even
increasing it when he could have cut his losses and gotten out.
The end result will be the same either way, and all he did was
add to the costs and death toll.

And then
there is the war on terror, which includes Pakistan, the war’s
epicenter. Pakistan was in terrible shape in 2008, and its
situation is, if anything, worse now, with a corrupt government
that is also ineffectual and not respected by the Pakistani
people. The Pakistanis have also been reviled and punished
repeatedly by the United States for various perceived
infractions, and their border region and tribal areas have
become free-fire zones for Hellfire missiles fired from drones.
Obama has
launched 283 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, which is six
times more than George W. Bush authorized in his eight years in
office. This was a deliberate choice on the part of the
administration to fight a war without making it look like a war
is being fought. Obama believed, probably correctly, that no
U.S. boots on the ground would mean no public perception that
the U.S. is actually at war, but the damage to the relationship
with a destabilized nuclear armed Islamabad has been severe and
Pakistan is central to any political settlement to end the
fighting in Afghanistan. The death of Osama bin Laden is a plus,
though it’s offset by the extralegal way in which he was killed.
Overall, Obama gets another “F.”

And then
there is the rest of the war on terror. The U.S. is now more
heavily involved with advisers in Yemen, has increased its drone
strikes and spec ops directed against Somalia, and has advisers
in Kenya, Mauritania, and Uganda. Drones have become the weapon
of choice in all these conflicts, and their use has now extended
to the U.S. border areas and police forces in the United States.
One police force in Texas is
mounting shotguns and grenade launchers on its drones. The
war on terror, under its new name, has expanded even though the
State Department’s annual report confirms that there are fewer
terrorists running around loose. But the few remaining
terrorists have found new places to operate due to the chaos
resulting after US interventions: Libya, Mali, and increasingly
in Iraq. That certainly deserves an “F.”

Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who might be a worse
secretary than even Madeleine “it was worth it” Albright, have
frequently criticized Russian internal politics. They have
supported the efforts of U.S.-government-funded NGOs like the
National Endowment for Democracy to teach Russians and other
Eastern Europeans about how to behave like good Americans. They
have done the same with the Arab Spring nations, leading the
Egyptians and Russians among others to demand that the American
advisers leave or face the consequences. Washington would not
tolerate “foreign advisers” interfering in U.S. national
politics, and it is incomprehensible that the United States,
which is rapidly becoming something like a national security
state, can give advice on democracy to anyone. Russia has also
responded to the criticism by
refusing to renew Nunn-Lugar, which is one of the few good
foreign policy initiatives engaged in by the U.S. Nunn-Lugar
funds the dismantling of nuclear arsenals in the former states
of the Soviet Union. Give Obama a “D.”

And then
there is the world’s most dangerous nation, Iran, at least
according to the U.S. media and Congress. Obama has avoided a
war, and it appears that he is reluctant to give in to Israeli
demands to start one, but he has not attempted in any serious
way to negotiate with Tehran and come to a settlement of
outstanding issues. Obama has had to bribe the Israelis into not
attacking Iran, whereas George W. Bush had sufficient authority
to order them not to do so, one of the few areas in which W.
outshines his successor. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has
more-or-less promised to do whatever Benjamin Netanyahu wants,
so he makes Obama look good. Obama gets a “C,” but if he wants
to improve his grade he has to tell Israel to take a hike while
admitting that Iran is really not much of a threat before
sitting down and discussing Tehran’s nuclear program in an adult
fashion.

And
finally there are the wars of humanitarian intervention, which
is a new category with this presidency, though it is a revival
of what fellow Democrat Bill Clinton did in the Balkans. Obama
has even created
a new bit of govspeak to conceal the reality of what he does:
“kinetic humanitarian action.” Libya, the unnecessary war, which
fortunately turned out to be cheaper and with less bloodshed
than Iraq, was the test run of the concept. The foreign military
intervention deposed a dictator but left behind a broken country
with a dispersed arsenal that is showing up in places like Mali.
And then there is Syria. The United States has no national
interest that compels it to encourage regime change in Syria,
which will certainly bring about a situation like that in Libya
with the added potential for becoming much, much worse.
Insistence on interfering in Syria has created something
approaching a civil war and has also soured relations with
Russia, which opposes intervention. The turmoil could easily
spill over into Lebanon and Turkey is starting to panic now that
it has foolishly opened Pandora’s box and supported the
insurgents. Humanitarian intervention deserves an “F” plus
double secret probation.

Obama’s
grades are somewhat disappointing: a B, a C, a D, and four F’s.
He will likely have trouble getting into a good college, and I
recommend that he instead learn a useful skill such as basket
weaving or pottery design.

Philip
Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and executive director of
the Council for the National Interest.

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